Elizabeth drew her lower lip between her teeth and turned away. “The lucky ones were married off, if they could be. Others were confined. Or hidden, passed among family who could bear with their predictions and strange visions and collapsing insanity.”
“And you?”
“Oh, I am sure I was meant to be no different. Only I was struck by some sort of physical illness, not just…” She frowned. Dropped her eyes to the floor. “Madness.”
Darcy stepped an inch closer, a strange light growing in his face. “You were chosen.”
She shrugged. “I think I was just… next.”
“No.” He shook his head vehemently. “Nothing about this—any of this—is mere accident. Nor will it simply go away because we find it inconvenient. Something is expected…demandedof us. And I will be damned if I can find out what it is.”
The words he had used—unvarnished, sharp with strain—still hung between them, at odds with the careful room and the gentleman who had spoken them. She had never heard him speak so, not even when provoked. It frightened her more than the admission itself.
Elizabeth folded her hands upon the chair’s back and found that she had gripped the wood hard enough to blanch her knuckles. She loosened them deliberately. Her mouth opened, closed again. Any comfort she might offer seemed barred from use, as though even sympathy would exact a toll he could not afford. And she could not touch him. She knew that much with an instinct she trusted.
“Well,” she said at last, and stopped.Tried again. “I imagine—” Her lips pressed together, then curved despite herself. “I imagine Miss Bingley would give a great deal to be so thoroughly entangled in a mystical calamity with Fitzwilliam Darcy.”
The silence that followed lasted no longer than a breath. He looked at her as though uncertain he had heard her rightly; something flickered across his expression—disbelief, then reluctant comprehension.
Then he laughed.
Not the restrained exhalation of amusement she knew so well, but a genuine sound, surprised out of him, as though it had taken him unawares. He turned his head aside at first, one hand lifting to his brow, and then laughed again—shorter, softer, until it broke on a cough he choked back manfully.
“I ought to have known,” he said, when he could speak, “that you would find some means of making sport of even this. It was foolish of me to expect otherwise.”
Elizabeth allowed herself a small, careful smile, relief loosening something tight behind her ribs.
He looked at her then—not as he had before, guarded or searching or braced against consequence—but openly. The firelight caught his expression and held it there: warm, intent, touched with an admiration she could not mistake. “At least, I am glad of one thing.”
“And that is?”
“That you have recovered your wit. It would be a far darker business indeed without it.” Darcy’s mirth faded then, though the warmth did not leave his face at once. He studied her a moment longer, then let his hand fall from the mantel.
“You said yourself that you feel better here. Not merely housed and supped, but… altered. Have you any notion why London should effect such a change?”
Elizabeth’s smile drew downward. “You have not discovered that already? Why, it is you, of course.”
She saw his throat bob. “Me? But I thought… you just said—”
“Yes, but that was in thebeginning, and I am not so certain it was you… directly. More like a sort of reckoning, or sensibility awakened. I puzzled over it for weeks, you may be assured. Then, when Mr Collins came to stay with us, I thought his voice alone should be the end of me.”
“Mr Collins?” Darcy narrowed his eyes. “Interesting.”
“But thenI discovered that the proximity of certain company dulled it. I had narrowed that company to… well, what I thought was quite another person entirely, but all along…”
“But surely, you should have improved when Mr Collins left Longbourn.”
“I would have hoped. But no. I grew worse by the day after the ball.”
He swallowed, looked away. “After I left. I… egad, I was wrong. What does your father think? Surely, he must have some knowledge or opinion on the matter.”
She dropped her eyes and, after a moment’s hesitation, reached into the pocket of her gown. The paper she drew out was creased from having been folded and unfolded more than once.
“I supposed you would ask. And I did not wish to answer you unprepared.” She held the express between them, offering it, but he made no move to accept it.
“My father writes with concern, as you may imagine. He is relieved—grateful, even—that I am improved under your roof.” Her fingers tightened slightly on the paper. “But he has not been content to trust that alone.”
Darcy’s brow knit. “Meaning?”
